Worlds apart. On class structuration of citizens’ political and public attention and engagement in an egalitarian society

Distinctions in the making: A theoretical discussion of youth and cultural capital

“…Studying the changing nature of Norwegians' political engagement, Hovden (2022) found that while the principal divide regarded the volume of public attention and engagement, a secondary divide separated traditional and emerging forms of public engagement. The emerging forms are more issue oriented and more digital, and more associated with younger people.…”

Stratified Citizens: Conceptualizing Civic Capital in Mediatized Societies

“…First, we are critical toward the monolithic focus on "politics" prevalent in the former position. According to Hovden (2023), this perspective neglects how social inequality divides the public sphere and its citizenry into "worlds apart." Hovden's analysis demonstrated that politics are primarily reserved for those who reside in an "elite public," whereas ordinary people not only have limited access to political matters (see also Verba & Nie, 1987) but, using a Bourdieusian logic, are also socially predisposed to neglect such matters (Bourdieu, 1984, p. 400).…”

“…They read legacy newspapers and trust key democratic institutions, whereas the less affluent tend to favor local over international news, generally read fewer newspapers, watch more television (often on commercial channels), and are not drawn to political debate and deliberation (Moe et al, 2019). Hovden (2023) denotes his main analytical object as the "public lifestyles" of citizens, that is, the preferences and interests, habits, resources, and attitudes relevant to the use and monitoring of the public sphere for citizens across both social strata and online and offline forms of engagement. The notion of habitus plays a key role in this understanding, as it underlines "the idea that our dispositions are never limited to one type of activity or social sphere (the unity of habitus)" which "entail[s] that our relation to the public cannot be compartmentalized as a specific aspect of our life" (Hovden & Moe, 2017, p. 399).…”

“…Based on a review of key perspectives on citizenship in political science and media and communication research, we revealed that previous studies in general fall short of considering citizenship a coherent repertoire of activities that can occur in and beyond the media. We proposed the notion of "the unity of habitus," which provides a theoretical basis for considering citizenship a dynamic process across online and offline spheres, and discussed this notion in relation to Hovden (2023), whose concept of "public lifestyles" provides a valuable development of Bourdieu's work, as it scrutinizes the relation between citizens' "inherently cross-mediated" (Schrøder, 2011) and physical, unmediated lives.…”

“…First, it cuts across scholarly silos and scrutinizes the civic habitus of people as it unfolds across both mediated and non-mediated life. Invoking the notion of the “unity of habitus” (Bourdieu, 1998; Hovden, 2023; Hovden & Moe, 2017), citizenship is seen as a complex interplay of practices, including formal and informal participation, (social) media usage and consumption, and deliberation practices—that is, a coherent repertoire of online and offline citizenship practices that vary for agents across the social space. Second, this approach is attentive to dimensions of social inequality and power, emphasizing how the many citizenship practices in the modern era are situated in an already existing, vertically stratified social world with a distinct symbolic order (Bourdieu, 1984).…”